Posted on 08/22/2006 9:38:43 AM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
Coldwell Banker Denies Claims By National Fair Housing Alliance
(CBS) CHICAGO A well-known real estate company is in the hot seat this Tuesday morning, accused of racial bias when it comes to selling Chicago area homes.
As CBS 2s Kristyn Hartman reports, the National Fair Housing Alliance conducted an undercover investigation of Coldwell Banker realty and says it came up with some very disturbing information.
The investigating agency says this is the third complaint nationally against the firm NRT Inc., the largest residential brokerage firm in the country and parent company to Coldwell Banker.
The National Fair Housing Alliance says it was the Coldwell Banker Gold Coast office specifically where their testers encountered discriminatory practices.
They had white and African-American testers pose as potential condominium buyers, looking for homes in such neighborhoods as Lincoln Park, the Gold Coast and Lakeview.
An Alliance spokeswoman said the investigation uncovered blatant discrimination by real estate agents against African-Americans. She said white testers saw 36 properties, while their African-American counterparts with better qualifications were shown only seven.
In one case, a real estate agent reportedly even suggested an African-American tester posing as a buyer should rent rather than buy.
At a news conference, the president of the group said agents were steering clients, which violates Fair Housing law violations she said Chicago has seen in the past.
Why, in Chicago, are we finding real estate agents still blatantly engaging in violations of the Fair Housing Act, these people who are working for Gold Coast? said National Fair Housing Alliance President Shanna Smith. You know, there are a lot of good agents in Chicago, but it only takes a handful of agents to perpetuate segregation and to limit a persons choice.
In filing its complaint, the Alliance is preparing federal litigation and talking with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In response to the allegations, Coldwell Banker President and Chief Operating Officer Doug Ayers said in a statement: "We take the allegations made by the National Fair Housing Alliance very seriously. But we have no reason to believe at this time that there is no merit to the complaint. Our company does not tolerate discrimination, which is well documented. We will of course continue to review the allegations."
Oh brother...
LMAO!
You have a virus that forces you to add keywords to threads on Free Republic?
Uhh. Okay.
No. I had a piece of AOL on my system that was allowing remote connections.
Whoa! Blast from the past!
So you're saying that your system was hacked for the purposes of adding keywords to a thread on FreeRepublic?
That isn't he only event that occurred on my computer. But, yes, that is the one you see here.
That's fascinating. I mean, it could have just as easily caused you to send emails, but instead you get keywords -- perfectly legible -- to post to an FR thread. How would a hacker have figured out how to do this? That's extraordinary.
Since I wasn't the only one. And others were on FR. I suspect it is a freeper.
My mail was opened in another browser and 2,000 emails were dumped.
A few other things too.
I.P. tracked back to a california university hop.
Wow. In 5 seconds. Amazing. And some relate to this thread exclusively. Really strange thread to do this on, you know?
The keywords I listed asking JimRob to post the author of (freeper that listed before) were on other threads too.
I would think that you would have to provide a link to the thread itself.
If they asked me for that when I had the threads opened back in post 30, I would have given it to them.
They didn't answer me.
I agree. If my wife can't narrow a buyer down to less than 5 properties, she drops them as a client. Can't waste your time with "lookie lews" who don't know what they want and just want a tour of the entire metro area at your time and expense.
Well, given that your posts were textbook examples from the Dale Carnegie school, I would have ignored you too. They aren't going to waste time babysitting you. If you want answers, YOU have to provite the information.
Even though JimRob ruled you "not guilty", if your computer causes you to spam FreeRepublic, it really wouldn't matter to me if it was your intention or not.
But Jim is nicer than I am.
I emailed Jim the notepad text of the exe that activated. He never responded.
Sure he did. He said "not guilty". But he isn't tech support.
I said email, not posted.
I'm just coming in to this from another thread and wasn't involved in it at the time of this thread.
You said -- "That's fascinating. I mean, it could have just as easily caused you to send emails, but instead you get keywords -- perfectly legible -- to post to an FR thread. How would a hacker have figured out how to do this? That's extraordinary."
NOW, given that Calpernia says that some kind of intrusion was happening, and looking at the "time factor" of those entries (very fast, so has to be automated), and seeing the order that these entries are put in -- this looks like some kind (not exactly though) of "dictionary attack" -- trying to go through an alphetical series for passwords.
Now, it's possible, with several windows open and some cross-interference with different programs plus the attack, that this dictionary attack got routed into a window for keywords.
So, no, I don't think that someone intentionally attacked for the purpose of entering keywords into this thread -- but -- I do think that someone was doing an attack to gain entry to something, using a sort of modified dictionary attack for passwords, and that ended up inadvertently getting into the keyword window/entry form for the Free Republic thread.
That's what it looks like to me...
Regards,
Star Traveler
P.S. Calpernia..., did you make any more sense of this incident?
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